Intel didn't have a lot of new information to hand out to the press seated at its CES event on Monday afternoon—most of what it had to show off were things we heard about before, whether through official or unofficial channels. What the conference did was give us a comprehensive look at the company's products and initiatives for 2013.

If you're familiar with Intel's initiatives of late, its new products are staying that course: emphasizing power consumption over all else and continuing to push its Atom processors into tablets and smartphones. Ultrabooks and convertible laptops also continue to factor prominently into the company's future plans, both with the next-generation Haswell chips and new Ivy Bridge processors that use even less power than the ones in currently shipping Ultrabooks.

Atom in smartphones

According to Intel, there are seven smartphones in the global market using its current Atom platform, codenamed Medfield. None of these phones, which are based on Intel's Atom Z2460 have really been aimed at the US market. But they've been relatively well-reviewed, and most importantly they appear to be competitive with ARM smartphones in both performance and battery life. An Intel-optimized version of Android and a compatibility layer for ARM-native apps in the Google Play store help to keep these phones familiar for users even though they're completely different from most Android handsets under the hood.

Enlarge/ It's not intended for high-end phones, but the Z2420 hits most of the right notes for consumers.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ The new Atom also supports dual SIMs, an FM radio receiver, a microSD card slot, and Wireless Display functionality.

Andrew Cunningham

Intel spent the most time today on a processor not intended to replace the Z2460, but to augment it: the Atom Z2420 (codenamed Lexington) is a 1.2GHz smartphone SoC based on the same Saltwell architecture as its bigger brother, but it's aimed at "emerging markets." It's definitely no powerhouse—its Imagination Technology SGX540 GPU was first released in 2007—but it features 30FPS 1080p video playback and quick photo capture, (two features important for its target audience), as well as HSPA+ connectivity provided by a modem of Intel's design.

Intel's next-generation Atom for smartphones, based on the company's 22nm manufacturing process, existed only as a nebulous "next generation" product on one of its slides; we know it will be based on the next-generation Silvermont CPU architecture, but not much else.

Atom in tablets

Intel's current-generation Clover Trail Atom platform is shipping in about ten Windows 8 tablets, according to the company, and like its smartphone chips, the Atom chips have proven to be mostly competitive with ARM chips in terms of performance and power consumption. In a tablet, there's an additional benefit—Intel-based tablets can run full Windows 8 and all of the desktop and legacy apps that entails; the ARM-only Windows RT can run only apps from the Windows Store and the built-in first-party desktop apps.

Clover Trail's follow-up is called Bay Trail, and it's a 22nm quad-core chip that promises twice the CPU performance of Clover Trail. Intel had three working Bay Trail-based tablets on the stage—they support Windows 8, of course, but unlike Clover Trail they will also support Android, using the same compatibility technology that makes Intel Android phones run.

Bay Trail-based systems should be available by "holiday 2013."

Ivy Bridge hits 7 watts

Enlarge/ Lenovo's IdeaPad Yoga 11S will be one of the first to use a 7-watt Ivy Bridge CPU.

Andrew Cunningham

Intel has previously talked about new, low-power Ivy Bridge processors that would consume 10 watts of power instead of the 17 watts common in today's tablets and Ultrabooks. Today Intel announced that not only would these chips begin shipping to its partners today, but they would also use less power than anticipated: these Ivy Bridge chips have a TDP of just 7 watts.

PCs from both Lenovo and Acer using these 7 watt chips should be coming to market this spring and summer—Lenovo's system, the IdeaPad Yoga 11S, is actually a smaller version of the IdeaPad Yoga 13 we reviewed. The Yoga is one of the better Windows 8 convertibles we've seen so far, and an 11-inch form factor might make it a bit more plausible as a tablet than its big brother.

The Intel processor will make the 11S much more useful than the Windows RT-based IdeaPad Yoga 11 that Lenovo is currently shipping, and at $799 its starting price is only $70 more than the ARM-based system.

All's well that Haswell

Enlarge/ A look at North Cape, Intel's reference Ultrabook for Haswell.

Andrew Cunningham

Actual technical details about Haswell, as well as information about availability, were thin on the ground, but mentions of the architecture were threaded throughout the presentation. Among other things, Intel hailed the architecture as the "largest generation-to-generation battery life increase in the history of Intel" and the first CPU architecture designed "from the ground up" for Ultrabooks and tablets, rather than being retrofitted for those form factors after the fact.

The company's first Haswell-based reference laptop, codenamed North Cape, is a convertible laptop with a detachable screen that tries to overcome the traditional shortcomings of convertible laptops (thickness and weight, mostly). The computer is just 17mm thick, but it still manages to include batteries in both the base and the screen (as is the case with other detachable convertibles).

Haswell will also bring some changes to the official (but not exactly stringent) requirements that OEM PCs must meet to earn the Ultrabook label. Most notably, Haswell Ultrabooks will be required to have touchscreens and will also be required to support Intel's Wireless Display technology—these are both features common to the Windows 8 Ultrabooks we've been seeing for the last year or so, but this year Intel wants to make them official requirements. Intel also wants to drive touchscreens down into the $599 price point, down from the $800-and-above spot that many of these machines occupy presently.

A potentially transformative year

If Intel is to be believed, 2013 will be the year when the company's mobile strategy is finally realized: it will be easy to find and to buy x86-based laptops, tablets, and smartphones, and said devices will be competitive with ARM-based devices in speed, battery life, and price.

It remains to be seen whether these innovations will actually be able to drive out ARM-based SoCs from tablets and smartphones, where Intel's competitors are pretty entrenched—big companies like Apple and Samsung seem content to use their own chips in their devices rather than relying on an outside source. The biggest selling point for Windows tablets is full x86 compatibility, but no such advantage exists on Android tablets and phones.

What Intel's proponents believe is that Intel's manufacturing advantages will ultimately make its chips' performance-per-watt so far superior to the competition that they'll essentially be forced to use Intel chips or lose their competitive edge. 2013 probably won't be the year that Intel's chips can reach that level, but the company's execution is definitely strong enough to make it plausible.

70 Reader Comments

And even with better power consumption, will companies be willing to lock themselves back into Intel, so Intel can raise the prices on them like they do with PCs? Because that's what it sounds like. Which is not necessarily a good thing if the consumer has the pay more for the processor just because Intel decided that mobile chips should be priced more equivalently to laptop and desktop chips.

well, if intel leaves arm in the dust, they (OEM manufacturer) won't have much of a choice will they? If only one of them decides to do switch to intel they will be the de-facto standard. No one will want the slow arm CPU's. So that manufacturer will have a huge advantage over the competition.

Its a great read, and given the point made in the conclusion that Intel is competitive or slightly ahead of most ARM designs today, with a 5 year old architecture on a three year old manufacturing process, that should be very frightening for ARM venders. Two years ago nobody took Intel serious in this space. Where will they be in two more years?

But that's significantly flawed as the software side is not held constant in the benchmarks. The operating systems, middleware and compiler toolchains are radically different between products.

And seriously... SunSpider is designed to be a browser benchmark. You can't use it to accurately benchmark hardware.

But otherwise, yeah, Atom and ARMv7 are in the same relative area of performance and power.

Definitely not Anand's best work though.

Yes, the previous article of Anand's was definitely a bit dodgy from what I can gather, since Intel managed to put one over on them. The Tegra 3 comparison tablet they gave Anand was running Surface RT, which from what I've heard doesn't yet support the Tegra's 5th "low-power" processor, as compared to Android, which does, so the ARM tablet essentially had its low-power mode crippled. Good 'ol Intel.

Fortunately, the second article had better comparisons, with Android included, and low and behold, ARM looked a lot better. But regardless of short-term Intel shenanigans, Intel is probably going to do some heavy duty "ARM twisting" in the near future, perhaps even before Haswell: Anand's second article pegged the peak TDP of Exynos 5 Dual (ARM 15) at nearly 8 watts, and that article was written before today's surprise announcement that Ivy Bridge will shortly be down to 7 watts TDP. Uh oh ARM. And that's before Haswell arrives. Gulp.

When there is an Intel powered MS tablet that has the same weight, battery life, screen resolution, CPU/GPU performance and price as competing Android/Apple tablets, then Intel will have met its goal. This has not happened yet.

" It's definitely no powerhouse—its Imagination Technology SGX540 GPU is the same used in the two-and-a-half-year-old iPhone 4—but it features 30FPS 1080p video playback and quick photo capture, (two features important for its target audience), as well as HSPA+ connectivity provided by a modem of Intel's design."

The China made MediaTek chips clocked at 1.5Ghz will beat it with Mali400 gpu and consumes even less power with much lower cost. What advantage can Intel bring there ?. The low-end and mid-end of handset cpu/gpu have changed since a year ago. It accelerates now that Chinese have plant capacities to release their newer products. Hisilicon is another producer with ARM license.

When there is an Intel powered MS tablet that has the same weight, battery life, screen resolution, CPU/GPU performance and price as competing Android/Apple tablets, then Intel will have met its goal. This has not happened yet.

This is also not their goal. They ship Atoms not in RT powered tablets (which is what competes with iPads/Androids), but in Windows 8 Pro powered tablets.

And look at the Razr i/Razr m comparisons. Identical phones, one with a Medfield, one with an ARM. The Intel model pretty convincingly at least competes with the ARM device, where it doesn't clearly win. That, to me, shows a SOLID improvement.

That doesn't even include the Ivy Trail (this is i3/i5/i7 arch, not Atom), coming in BELOW the high end ARM parts in terms of TDP. That's full on ultrabook performance in a power envelope smaller than high end tablet parts.

All this, in two years. Um...if ARM isn't scared, they aren't paying attention. Intel has ALWAYS had process advantage. If they also have TDP advantage at the same node generation? ARM's in trouble...

What's missing in all these comparisons is price. Can Intel make money & fund their existing process advantage if they're selling SoCs for $25? Or will they start hitting PC users for more money to make their push into mobile devices?

There is a lot of talk about where Intel will be in 5 years, but don't forget that ARM isn't standing still either, in five years a lot can happen for anyone.

But what I think is really important to consider, for those of us who remember the days of ever faster processors, is this interesting turn in Intel strategy. How many ultra-high end processors are today measured only on performance? How many ultra-high end processors will be measured only on performance in 5 years? We've already transitioned away from a solely Mhz scale and now we are transitioning away from a strictly performance scale to one based on performance measured against energy used.

1) Price is not that important. If charging a bit more enables Intel to be a node or two in front of everyone else then their speed and power advantage is going to compensate for the higher price.

2) Just like AMD is seen as good enough? (lets be honest it is good enough for 99% of the users)People fall for PR and intel can afford a lot of it, not to mention that a lot of power users are probably going to go with x86 rather than ARM if they have a choice and rest tends to follow sooner or later.

Whatever the case, platforms like Android and iOS can move to x86 if needed. Android... we already have real products. iOS... XCode can already build native x86 iOS binary for use with the Simulator. So I can see how 'number of apps' arguments won't be too disadvantageous for Intel.

In the end, it'll be up to how well Intel can push the envelope and market its chips in a market where ARM is the entrenched leader.

I think price is important but also the fact that companies can license and produce their own arm processors, we've seen Apple do that with the A6 and I think Nvidia at some point last year extended their license so they could produce their own cpus. It must be attractive being able to have much more control over your SoC particularly if you want a more unusual SoC with a much beefier gpu or similar.

Android/iOS tablet and smartphone users don't care about the extra performance Intel offers, Arm is good enough and no manufacturer wants to get locked in with Intel when they can roll their own solution or pick from a wide variety of others.

Even if Intel somehow gets out ahead of Arm on power and performance I don't think anything will change.

Android/iOS tablet and smartphone users don't care about the extra performance Intel offers, Arm is good enough and no manufacturer wants to get locked in with Intel when they can roll their own solution or pick from a wide variety of others.

Even if Intel somehow gets out ahead of Arm on power and performance I don't think anything will change.

Windows has managed to have a cross platform front end (the artist formerly known as Metro), so going forwards, why couldn't iOS/Android end up with something that worked over the processor architecture?

OEMs seem to want the continuously advancing rate that all the ARM designers are giving them. Qualcomm, Samsung, nVidia, TI, Freescale, and so forth are launching news designs to the market every quarter or faster. Intel's tick tock strategy give them a rack of new devices once year or less often. I don't think OEMs want such a slow pace.

ARM device makers gives OEMs a very large smörgåsboard of devices to chose from with vastly different characteristics.. Intel give them a handful, all almost identical. Would an OEM want to make a devices that's indistinguishable from its competitors, just like it's been in the Wintel world for the last 20 years?

Intel is a sole vendor. The ARM device maker armada are legion.

ARM vendors can move quickly as a collective and individually and at the whim of OEM's. Intel is a slow moving behemoth that takes order from nobody.

Even if Intel's SoC offerings offer the same performance/watt as certain ARM offerings, that says nothing about the usability of those offerings. For example a POWER7 MCM might offer the same performance/watt, but at 250W it won't fit inside a cellphone. Intel must move sub-1W at the low end. It's not enough that they can compete at the high end only. An OEM will have they complete range on the same platform.

Volume. Can Intel really deliver as many chips as the ARM based OEMs need? They would have to multiply their output too keep up.

This war will be won or lost not on the ARM vs. x86 front but rather on the PowerVR/Mali/Adreno vs. Intel HD front. Intel has a very strong pedigree in logic processors and CMOS fabrication, but their history of reliance on discrete graphics processors from third parties has, um, rendered them quite late to the graphics party. Haswell is their last chance to market a serious integrated graphics solution that can compete with PowerVR on performance per watt.

I am curious if Bay Trail will spell the end of WindowsRT. If you can choose between WinRT on ARM and Win8 on Atom, and they both get roughly the same performance, battery, and price, why limit yourself to WinRT?

There's also the matter of processor cost. Ie. Intel's chips would have to be a LOT better for companies like Samsung and Apple to buy from them vs. designing and/or manufacturing their own ARM chips. Unless of course Intel wants to lower their margins quite a bit.

I am curious if Bay Trail will spell the end of WindowsRT. If you can choose between WinRT on ARM and Win8 on Atom, and they both get roughly the same performance, battery, and price, why limit yourself to WinRT?

I have been wondering that as well, Windows RT made a lot more sense a few years ago when Intel seemed to be struggling to get the power consumption down for tablet designs which meant very underpowered tablets running operating systems too heavy for them with poor battery life. Now though Windows 8 runs very well on less powerful hardware and Intel are doing a much better job scaling their processors down, the flexibility Win8 has to run legacy software is a big advantage particularly if it's coming at relatively low cost. I quite like windows 8 for a variety of reasons but so far dislike a lot of the touch applications, so many of them seem to waste so much space I wouldn't like to be limited to them although I guess in time that will change.

Overall it is good to see competition heating up between Intel and Arm as that should be good for us as amd's recent performance with their processors has been concerning.

Its a great read, and given the point made in the conclusion that Intel is competitive or slightly ahead of most ARM designs today, with a 5 year old architecture on a three year old manufacturing process, that should be very frightening for ARM venders. Two years ago nobody took Intel serious in this space. Where will they be in two more years?

This is the part that people don't get. Intel was behind and has caught up. Their rate of improvements is faster. as said, they are using 5 year old architecture adn 3 year old process. a couple of year from now with a more modern architecture and current process (which will likely be at least 1 step ahead of ARM), Atom looks poised to dominate.

I know this is nitpicky, but the iPhone 4 didn't use a SGX 540, it used the quite slower SGX 535. The Galaxy S (and Nexus S) from the same time period used the SGX 540. So just as old, just not as slow.

As an aside, the SGX 540 at higher clocks wasn't too far off the Mali 400 in the Exynos 4210 and the Adreno 220 in Snapdragon S3 and pretty much equal to the Tegra 2.

Its a great read, and given the point made in the conclusion that Intel is competitive or slightly ahead of most ARM designs today, with a 5 year old architecture on a three year old manufacturing process, that should be very frightening for ARM venders. Two years ago nobody took Intel serious in this space. Where will they be in two more years?

This is the part that people don't get. Intel was behind and has caught up. Their rate of improvements is faster. as said, they are using 5 year old architecture adn 3 year old process. a couple of year from now with a more modern architecture and current process (which will likely be at least 1 step ahead of ARM), Atom looks poised to dominate.

No, you can't necessarily go by their rate of improvement, because it is easier to improve when you are behind. For example, the improvements you need to make are simpler, and you can improve by copying others. That doesn't mean you will ever get ahead. For example, Apple Maps is improving faster than Google maps, but who knows if they can ever fully catch up or get ahead? Similarly, ARM isn't standing still and will also get made on newer manufacturing processes. Finally, people have been predicting that Intel would defeat ARM for a while now, so some skepticism is warranted.

Intel is going to have better luck scaling down Haswell than sticking with the antiquated two-port in-order Atom microarchitecture, particularly since their integrated graphics roadmap involves a tight integration with the L3 cache (which Atom doesn't have).

The full Haswell core is an eight-port out-of-order design with four math/logic units and four load/store units. The ultramobile Haswell core could be a four-port design with two ALUs and two LSUs. This compares well with the three-port out-of-order ARM cores (A15 and Krait). Trim down the buffer sizes (uop cache, reservation station, etc.) and the cache sizes, and there's your low-power part.

The key, though, is retaining the L3 cache architecture with the ring bus and main memory controller from the Core microarchitecture, because when it comes to integrated graphics, memory bandwidth is almost always the limiting factor. Atom is not a solid foundation for a modern integrated graphics processor.

Intel is going to have better luck scaling down Haswell than sticking with the antiquated two-port in-order Atom microarchitecture, particularly since their integrated graphics roadmap involves a tight integration with the L3 cache (which Atom doesn't have).

The full Haswell core is an eight-port out-of-order design with four math/logic units and four load/store units. The ultramobile Haswell core could be a four-port design with two ALUs and two LSUs. This compares well with the three-port out-of-order ARM cores (A15 and Krait). Trim down the buffer sizes (uop cache, reservation station, etc.) and the cache sizes, and there's your low-power part.

The key, though, is retaining the L3 cache architecture with the ring bus and main memory controller from the Core microarchitecture, because when it comes to integrated graphics, memory bandwidth is almost always the limiting factor. Atom is not a solid foundation for a modern integrated graphics processor.

Haswell is sounding very impressive indeed but it's likely to be a fairly expensive part, especially in ULV varieties.

Is there really the money in the mid and low range of the smartphone and tablet market to be able to afford Haswell? I got the impression that a lot of these processors are as costly as an entire phone.

Weren't Atom chips supposed to fall under the same family as Haswell? Are these "new" atoms new architectures, or just further refinements of the now quite old one? I guess Silvermont is the true next gen Atom, not any of the ones announced today?

It's impressive that such an old architecture such as Atom can compete with ARM cores, but I'd like to see what a next gen atom could bring. ARM isn't a sitting duck after all.

"and most importantly they appear to be competitive with ARM smartphones in both performance and battery life."I always have a nagging feeling that one company is just keeping ahead and not pushing the limits of technology and the other is just doing enough to keep up. This make for slow long advancement, and no leaps forward.IBM make processors - where are they in this race to mediocrity.What about the Sony Cell CPU.

I would be more excited about these things if there was a battery manufacture teaming with a SoC manufacture to develop a leap forward in technology.

why dont Intel get things sorted and release Broadwell now, force ARM to step up the game, like AMD and Intel battle of a few years ago.

Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.